The weirdness of Samual Fuller's vision of mental illness and its treatment in Shock Corridor

Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor (1963), which he wrote/produced/directed is a deliberately sensational and over-the-top drama with an absolutely ludicrous plot, some truly weird scenes, and a haunting vision about life in a mental-health institution that, for all its campy exaggeration, is both scary and sad, rising over the obvious flaws in this film. The plot involves a newspaper reporter who thinks he'll win the Pulitzer Prize (which everyone in the movie mispronounces btw) by getting himself admitted to a mental institutions as a patient and while there he will interrogate other patients to find info to solve a murder. His investigation such as it is consists of asking patients "Who killed Sloan," until he gets an answer, and eventually the Pulitzer - so ridiculous a plot line it's not even worth ripping it apart. That said, Fuller's real interest is in showing the life in the halls of the institution, and his vision is quite harrowing: We see the reporter attacked by a group of "oversexed" women (a hilarious scene), get in a tussle with a black man who is a virulent white supremacist, engage in weird conversations with a man who thinks he's a Civil War general, a famous scientist who behaves like a 6-ear-old boy (they play hide-and-seek), and a man who goes by Pagliacci who thinks he's an opera singer. While these eccentric behaviors dominate the foreground, the real interest, visually and viscerally, comes from the deep focus, where we see many men standing in the hallway, in zombie-like states or stuck in loops of repetitive motion (one man, for example, rows like a member of crew throughout much of the film). The twist of the plot, obvious from the outset, is that the reporter, who enters the asylum healthy, becomes increasingly like the patients until at the end he's seriously ill. This concept - the hospital as infectious - was reversed not long after in the adaptation of Kesey's Cuckoo's Nest, in which we sense that the hospitalized men are healthier and more sane than their so-called caretakers. That was a '60s concept, and Fuller is definitely in working in the spirit of the '50s (one man against the system), even filming in the nearly antiquated b/w though using color for some bizarre dream/hallucination sequences.